“Naturally the advance planning that we did on this thing belongs on the credit side of the ledger. So also does the venture into night flying, although in the final analysis the only real effect it had on this operation was to hold us in the area for one more night. Had we found the U-505 at night, there would have been no possibility of capture—that boarding idea was improbable enough in broad daylight, it was impossible at night.
This whole operation is an example of the fact that a military commander controls events only up to a certain point. He can anticipate certain things, perhaps even set the stage for them to happen, and can be ready to cash in on them if they do happen. But whether they will happen or not depends on many things over which he has no control. One is what goes on in the other commander’s mind and another is what goes on in his own. Both of these mental processes are subject to influence from above, or by Divine sufferance, from below. I am not trying to say that we have no control over our destiny on this earth. But I do say that in many things we control it only up to a certain point. Beyond that point nebulous things which occur inside men’s brains decide the issue. In this particular instance, I speak from firsthand experience when I say the stuff that ran through my mind for a week or so was all wrong, but the final result was very good….
The only moral I can see to all this is to plan your operations carefully, get the best advice you can from experts, fix it so that if certain things happen, you will not be caught flat-footed, and then, rely on the motto we have stamped on all our pennies—’In God We Trust.’” – From Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea, by Rear Admiral Daniel V Gallery . In June of 1944, Gallery’s Naval Task Group Task Group 22.3 boarded and captured the German submarine U-505, the first capture of an enemy man-of-war at sea since 1915, taken as a Prize of War and still on public display, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.